7 Great Reads To Celebrate the Release of Steven Millhauser’s Voices in the Night

Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright
Millhauser most often writes short stories; his almost yearly appearance in the Best American Short Stories anthology is a testament to his talent and his craft. But of his three novels, two are especial standouts. This is the dark and delightful story of a late boy genius narrated by his best friend. Edwin, obsessed with animation and comics, writes his magnum opus, Cartoons, then dies under mysterious circumstances. The story is told in the style of an old-fashioned biography, but with a focus on child characters, it’s both dark and whimsically funny.

Martin Dressler 
This is one of Millhauser’s best and best known books, which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sly, dreamlike, and evocative, it’s the story of Dressler, a turn-of-the-century Horatio Alger who goes from bellhop to hotel magnate. As the book goes on, his architectural feats grow all the more grand: hotels with subterranean courtyards, indoor theater districts, and an enclosed lake with an island reachable only by boat. Pushing the boundaries of the possible, these buildings are cities unto themselves. Dressler’s hungry ambition is tempered by his fraught relationship with the cold, quiet Emmeline.

The Barnum Museum
Here Millhauser is in top story form. In “A Game of Clue,” a family reunited for the holidays plays a game of…you guessed it, Clue. But their tense relationships run parallel to the machinations of the game’s characters: the tawdry, bored Miss Scarlet; the lost and wandering Professor Plum. You’ll never think of Clue the same way again. Of the nine remaining stories, the strongest is “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” which also made its way onto the big screen as The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton and Jessica Biel. It’s the tale of a shadowy nineteenth-century European magician, whose sublime feats escalate further and further until finally he seems to make ghostly children appear from thin air. Or does he?

The Knife Thrower
A common Millhauser move is the use of unnamed narrators, unofficial town spokespeople trying to account for some uncanny series of events. A few of this book’s standout stories work this way. In “Beneath the Cellars of Our Town,” a network of labyrinthine tunnels of unknown origin lie under an otherwise unextraordinary burg. “Some say that we descend in order to lose our way,” the narrator says of the townspeople’s explorations, as if describing the experience of reading Millhauser’s stories themselves. “The Sisterhood of Night,” with its film adaptation premiering last month, focuses on an exclusive club of schoolgirls who meet in the woods at night for mysterious reasons. Millhauser’s children are often strange, secretive creatures, and the ones in this story are no exception; imagine The Crucible set in a present-day high school, the adults looking on in confusion and fear.

Dangerous Laughter
In “The Wizard of West Orange” and “The Room in the Attic,” characters find themselves lost in the dark, but in very different ways. The first story’s narrator works in the library of a fictional scientific compound a la Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park grounds, and he unwittingly becomes an early experimental test subject. The contraption involved evolves from a glove to a full suit that obscures all but sense of touch, taking its wearer to new heights of tactile stimulation.
The teenaged protagonist of “The Room in the Attic” meets the shy sister of a friend, a girl who refuses to leave her pitch-dark bedroom. Neither knows what the other looks like, but as they get to know each other better, this becomes part of the allure. Both stories tap into the rush of feeling that comes with new love, but in surprisingly different ways. Bonus story: “In the Reign of Harad IV,” a sublime story about a palace miniaturist, is available on The New Yorker fiction podcast, read by the amazing Cynthia Ozick.

Voices in the Night: Stories
“I should have said no to the stranger at the door,” says the narrator of Millhauser’s “Miracle Polish.” But if he had, there wouldn’t be a story, would there? The narrator of this story, one of the sixteen in Millhauser’s latest collection, buys himself some household cleaner from an odd traveling salesman. “It seemed an ordinary bottle, a bottle like any other,” he thinks, but soon realizes he has got hold of something much more extraordinary: a polish that can not only brighten up a mirror, but the life of the person reflected there, too.
In “Mermaid Fever,” the body of a young mermaid washes ashore in a small beach town on the east coast, setting the community wild. Innocent mermaid costumes and pool parties lead to far more sinister events—lies, speculation, disappearances. “It was a time of exaggerated rumors, of impossible stories, which we ourselves invented in order to see how much we could bear,” the narrator says. This impossible story is itself a standout, and shows us again the boundless imagination of a great American storyteller.
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